" 이글은 코리아 타임스 8월 6일자에 실린 칼럼 입니다."

By Neil Armstrong

A habitual cyclist friend of mine was recently minding his own business in the inside lane. Trouser-clipped, helmeted, and with a 10km a day habit, he is nevertheless conscious not to let experience lull him into believing it will never let him down.

But what happened next occurred at the very intersection of the words accident and assault. A car simply turned right into him, as if he were no more real than the laws of the road. He came off and landed on his spine, the impact traumatically arched by his backpack.

The hospital quickly diagnosed a compressed fracture of the lumbar and ordered two weeks flat-on-his-back rest and recuperation. Alone in a foreign country, a short-termer not yet proficient in the language, and now statically marooned away from his very active daily routine of work and exercise, he needed help.

The title ``doumi” is one occasionally disparaged. Deriving from the verb ``to help” it is commonly associated with women who will, for a fee, ``assist” male customers in certain singing rooms: by pouring drinks, by having a very elastic definition of their job description, and, oftentimes, by being the only in-tune person present.

Should photographs of a popular celebrity taken while she was in similar part-time employ pre-fame surface, they underline the term’s borderline sleazy connotations and the public’s right to judge them. But there are other sorts of doumi. There are the doumi that will come around to your house after you have given birth and clean, cook, and care for the newborn (sanhujori doumi).

There are the doumi that will act as housemaid if you are too busy or wealthy to do it yourself (gasa doumi). And there are the doumi that will sleep on a narrow mattress squeezed between beds in a busy ward and tend to your every care need all day and all through the night. And a ``ganbyeongin,” in contradistinction to the amateur singer, has a certificate qualifying her for the role. This is the kind of doumi with which my recuperating friend was obligatorily supplied.

The system of care in this particular hospital was in some ways different to those my friend was familiar with back home. There, a nurse’s job description includes the nitty-gritty of primary care, such as bed bathing and turning down the sheets.

My friend, on his first, doumi-less day, experienced young women who, while pleasant and efficient, did little other than regulate his intravenous drip and deposit medication on the shelf next to his bed. The doctors visited en-masse once every morning, at which times my friend could interact with medics who spoke competent English, but only in brief once-a-day spurts. So it was through the non-verbal lingua franca of silent sympathy that, with his doumi, he conducted the only real relationship during his stay.

It has been reported that Korean government expenditure on the health care system is now increasing at the fastest rate in the OECD. However, the lady to whom my friend is so grateful did not receive the entirety of the fee assigned to her employ, a portion of which went to an agency.

The line of work in which she is engaged is inconsistent, depending ghoulishly on the ill-timed misfortune of others. There is no clocking off, staying as she must overnight and with the likelihood of serially broken sleep. She is not in receipt of any special health care benefits from the hospital itself, against whose environment of air thick with viruses her body will have to build resistance. And, if my friend was of a mind to, he might be able to earn more in an hour than she does in twenty four chatting about the recent World Cup over four dollar coffees with a couple of the doctors.

So every time I visited, he asked me to convey his thanks to the lady who was efficiently and uncomplainingly facilitating his every bodily function. I tried to lace the thanks with my friend’s unexpressed deep gratitude. My friend went further and thought that the ``doumi” should get more recognition and reward. Leaving her with a significant tip, he also left with the thought that some of that increased health care expenditure should end up in his helper’s purse.

The writer is a lecturer at Kyungnam University. He can be reached at

aex_nba@yahoo.co.uk.

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